Breakneck Speed Needed for Foreign Exchange Operations

With a tradition of 97 years of operations in India, this private sector bank carries a strong reputation for serving banking needs in India. Their traditional values in customer focus allow the Bank to constantly innovate through technology and improve operations for better customer service. Currently, this Bank operates a total of 630 branches and 1,700 Automated Teller Machine (ATMs) in India, covering 18 states and 2 union territories across the country. The Bank has over 3,940 employees serving more than a million customers.

The Challenge

Customers expect banks to provide fast and seamless transactions at all times of the day, regardless of the location. With its vast network across India, this Bank is always looking for ways to improve and innovate their internal business processes.

For this Bank’s Department of Foreign Exchange Operations, customers expect the Bank to respond at breakneck pace, something that is inherent to currency trading. With the information heavy, process driven nature of currency trading, staff in the Forex Department are deluged with huge amount of paper documents generated by the hour. These documents include letters of credit, packing credit limit loans, bank guarantees, applications for discounts and many more. These documents require approval from a competent authority in the head office of the Bank in Chennai, which is located separately from its branch offices spread across the country.

Given this background, previously the bank had to invest extensively in logistical processes and support, and this led to increased expenditure for the Bank. Apart from this, the Bank had also been incurring long lead times for the approval of documents, which impacted the customer.

The Solution

In association with Kodak Alaris, the management of Information Technology and Forex Departments of this Private Sector Bank, embarked on a document capture journey encompassing intelligent information management with Kodak Alaris scanners.

These included over 70 units of Kodak Alaris scanners, coupled with a document flow application which was seamlessly integrated into their business operations. Since then, the Bank has not looked back. This Bank has been using its Kodak Alaris fleet of scanners since early 2010. The full fleet consists of Kodak Scanner i1200 series, Kodak Scanner i1400 series and Kodak i3200 Scanners to boost internal workflow management. Paper assets from the Forex Department are now digitally captured and sent to the International Division office in real-time, eliminating the need for courier services and consequent delays.

Results

By utilizing Kodak Alaris document capturing solutions, this Bank was able to achieve the following benefits:

• Increase in new and existing customer base by over 30% due to faster turnaround time and resultant improvements in service quality.
• Increased productivity due to easier capturing and extraction of information from paper assets.
• Elimination of courier expenditure resulting in huge cost savings for the company.
• Easing process of financial audits due to convenient, retrievable digital documents complete with searchable tags.

Kodak Alaris scanners are easy to use and the technology is trust-worthy. By digitizing documents, the bank has essentially removed the need to physically deliver documents for central processing. This has resulted in increased cost savings, better productivity and improved customer service.